Avici began life with theoretical promise as a core-router vendor, an alternative to Cisco and Juniper for carrier customers. The company never had more than a handful of customers, though, and when it lost its biggest customer (AT&T/SBC), its fate was sealed.

It wasn’t long before employees were being shed and Morgan Stanley was hired as an investment-banking agent to identify “strategic options.” When a buyer could not be found, the company reached the end of the road and officially filed for dissolution.

Sadly, it’s a familiar story. Soapstone, nee Avici, is not alone in the networking graveyard.

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Observers continue to puzzle over RIM’s motivation in the ongoing Nortel saga. Why, people ask, has RIM enlisted the Canadian government in a bid to thwart or otherwise complicate Ericsson’s pending acquisition of Nortel’s wireless business unit in a court-sponsored auction?

As I’ve said previously, RIM would like to get its hands on Nortel’s LTE patents. I have no doubt about it.

What’s interesting is that Nortel’s LTE patents were not included in the pending sale of its wireless assets to Ericsson. If that deal goes through, the Swedish telecommunications manufacturer will get CDMA and LTE products and technologies, but it will not gain ownership of Nortel’s LTE patents.

Nortel has more than 5,500 patents, of which 600 — mainly relating to CDMA — are being transferred to Ericsson under the proposed deal.

So, Nortel has sold its wireless business unit, but its LTE patents remain potentially in play. Nortel supposedly wants to keep them, recasting itself as a “patent troll,” stocked with more lawyers than engineers. RIM, of course, would like to acquire them, presuming Nortel is willing or forced to put them on the auction block.

I could be wrong, but I think RIM has involved the Canadian government – and invoked a concerted propaganda campaign – to compel Nortel to offer the patents, many of which were devised and developed in Canadian research laboratories, for sale to a Canadian buyer. The argument would be that such valuable intellectual property, at least some of which was financed by Canadian taxpayers, should remain in the country, where the work can continue under the auspices of a real company (RIM) – you know, one with actual engineers — rather than a corporate shell manned by fast-taking lawyers and green-visored accountants.

Now is apparently the time for market-research companies to churn out their latest mobile-handset data, with iSuppli joining the deluge in reporting its latest numbers.

It says there was sequential (from the first quarter to the second) growth of nearly 5 percent in the second quarter, the first quarter-on-quarter growth in nine months. (It is important to recognize that this data does not conflict with year-to-year declines in quarterly unit shipments reported by Strategy Analytics and IDC.)

Said iSuppli analyst Tina Teng:

“The moderate increase indicates the worldwide mobile handset market is bottoming out and now is returning to growth.”

For 2009 on the whole, however, the research firm says unit shipments will shrink 9.9 percent (relative to 2008) to 1.1 billion units. That would be the first annual decline in eight years.

Looking to the immediate future, iSuppli foresees an improving second half, with quarter-on-quarter sequential unit-shipment increases of 6 percent in the third quarter and 8.3 percent in the fourth quarter.

We’ll see, though. Nearly everybody seems cautiously optimistic at the moment, but a setback in reported consumer or business spending could occasion downward revisions by market trackers in subsequent months.

Strategy Analytics says global handset shipments reached 273 million units in the second quarter, a decrease of 8 percent compared to shipments in the same quarter last year. For its part, IDC reported that handset vendors shipped a total of 269.6 million units worldwide, down 10.8 percent from 302.2 million units in the second quarter a year ago.

As for market share, IDC paints a picture similar to the one depicted by Mobile Entertainment. IDC estimates that Nokia held a 38.3 percent global market share in the second quarter, followed by Samsung with 19.4 percent, LG with 11.1 percent, and Motorola with 5.5 percent. Sony Ericsson accounted for 5.1 percent share, and “others” totaled 20.7 percent. Those “others” usually get a sizeable chunk.

In its market outlook, IDC sees consumer demand for high-end handsets. Apple is feasting in the high-end smartphone category, with Strategy Analytics estimating that the Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor shipped 5.2 million iPhones worldwide in the second quarter.

Handset sales by Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson totaled 213.9 million units, down from 247.9 million handsets sold in the same quarter last year. That’s a year-to-year drop of 13.7 percent.

Some vendors suffered more than others, with the South Korean manufacturers taking market share from their rivals. Nokia, which remains the overall market leader, saw its shipments decline 15.4 percent on a year-to-year basis. The biggest gainer was Samsung, which saw it handset sales grow 14.4 percent relative to the corresponding quarter last year.

The company that fell off the map was Motorola, whose shipments plummeted 47.3 percent. Sony Ericsson was nearly as wretched, with unit sales dropping 43.4 percent.

With sales 103.2 million phones in the quarter, Nokia retained a clear lead over runner-up Samsung, which sold about 52.3 million handsets. LG breezed past Motorola to become the number-three vendor.

This isn’t a new development. McAfee has been getting its act together for a while now, whereas Symantec cannot seem to recover from its ill-advised acquisition of Veritas back in 2005. The legacy that former Symantec CEO John Thompason left behind has been more albatross than soaring eagle.

Current Symantec CEO Enrique Salem, who’s been in the security industry a great many years in a number of high-profile roles, probably wishes he could have a do-over. Unfortunately for him, he and his executive team will have to find a way to get an unfocused, unwieldy, and fractious company back on track. He’ll require a large measure of good fortune as well as skill and diplomacy.

The wheels seem to be falling off at Symantec, and the problems cannot all be blamed on a moribund macroeconomy. McAfee is not experiencing the same degree of pain that Symantec is suffering. In every market where the two companies compete head to head, McAfee is getting the better of its larger rival.

Symantec’s losses in enterprise and small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are especially troubling. That’s where the company, with its product portfolio, should compete effectively, where it soup-to-nuts security offerings should be packaged and sold as end-to-end solutions. But it’s not happening, and Symantec is failing to get customers to sign long-term licensing deals. Again, McAfee is having more success on that front.

Nobody, especially investors, likes to see one-year deals instead of three-year pacts, and Symantec has a lot of them. When these are reviewed a year from now, they might not be renewed. They could go elsewhere. That customers are willing to make only tentative commitments should concern all Symantec stakeholders. The revenue declines the company has been experiencing have been bad, but they could get worse.

Meanwhile, though Symantec has improved its consumer offerings, that’s not a market for the faint of heart. Freeware and “cheapware” — from a host of vendors, including Microsoft, which finally is owning up to its security obligators to consumers — are thinning already pressured margins. So, even though the consumer space is an area where the company’s fortune are ebbing less distressingly than elsewhere, that situation is likely to worsen with time.

Has Symantec entered desperate times?

You know what they say about desperate times. They call for desperate measures. At some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, Salem might give serious consideration to throwing off the distracting boat anchor of Veritas and the detritus it has accumulated since that dubious acquisition.